In January, amid similar troubles with TikTok’s service, users who tried to post content critical of President Trump’s immigration actions, speculation arose that the issue was an attempt to censor non-conservative users by the new, Trump-affiliated owners of TikTok’s US-based wing. TikTok US denied censoring users in this manner.
By all accounts, the denial of censorship appears to be genuine. (I don’t know about you, but there’s been a lot of anti-ICE content in my TikTok feed since that outage.) So clearly the culprit was a server issue involving Oracle, and is once again — one of the stakeholders in the entity that now owns TikTok US.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s system status page says the company’s Ashburn, Virginia facility is experiencing a “service disruption” as of Tuesday night. “Oracle engineers have taken steps to improve the stability of the underlying services supporting the affected network infrastructure, and are now moving forward with further mitigation efforts,” the page says.
According to DownDetector, the problems were reported as early as Tuesday morning, and the problem appears to have peaked and begun to subside by Wednesday morning as users in much of the US went to sleep.
TikTok data for US users began being kept in the US long before it was transferred from the China-based business unit to the US, so the data migration from servers in Singapore may have nothing to do with these issues.
According to a February 1 statement from TikTok US, the physical trigger of the previous server issue was “a significant disruption caused by winter weather.”
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